Several weeks ago, Hubs and I returned after a week in Southern California. It was about 1a.m. by the time we arrived home. Traveling coast to coast may seem glamorous, but it’s just exhausting.

For whatever reason, I decided that we should go pick up our mail. I’m not sure why we didn’t wait until the next day. It wasn’t as though our mail was going anywhere and having it sit in the metal box for another day wasn’t going to hurt anyone.

Hubs didn’t argue, so we went ahead, down the block. It was hot and muggy, but not unbearably. I only noticed the mugginess because we had been in the dry desert for so long. A weeks worth of mail looked to be mostly spam. I grabbed them all, hugging them to my body like when you were in high school, holding your books. Our neighborhood is a gated community with a security guard, so it was relatively safe to walk around our neighborhood at night. We returned to the townhouse without incident.

What I hadn’t realized at the time was that hot + muggy + nighttime + undisturbed newspaper = perfect roach motel.

I was turning on one of our lamps when I saw the biggest cockroach skitter across my belly.

I seriously, freaked the hell out, jumping up and down, hoping to dislodge the insect from my body before it crawled anywhere over my naked skin, screaming little a hysterical maniac. I am embarrassed to tell you this. It was just a cockroach. What was the worst it could have done? It’s not as though it would have killed me. As much as I like to pretend that I’m a strong woman, I still cannot stand insects crawling on me. That scene in Indiana Jones:Temple of Doom? “Sounds like fortune cookies!” Still don’t like watching it.

“Quick! Take your clothes off!” he said. He had thought it was underneath my clothes.

He ripped off my tank and skirt, leaving them in a haphazard pile on the floor. Hubs turned me around, looking to see if it was still on me. Thankfully, it wasn’t. Then we poked the clothes on the floor, but it wasn’t there anymore either.

For a little while, standing in my underwear in my living room, feeling utterly ridiculous, I thought maybe I had imagined it. It had been a long day, and I had only seen it for a fraction of a second. It could have been totally like a trick of the light that made something look like a glistening carapace crawling along my abdomen.

“Oh, it’s right there,” he said. It had been hiding under the darkness of the couch.